Nick Nicolaou doesn’t have a perfect answer for why he does what he does. That is both the blessing and the curse of Abel Ferrara’s documentary ode to the tradition of New York cinephilia, “The Projectionist.” It can be a problem when a viewer has spent the length of a feature with a subject and at the end, still does not truly understand what drives him. Nicolaou tells Ferrara that he simply loves two things: “Making money and keeping neighborhood theaters alive.” Could it be that simple?
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A Cypriot immigrant who, when he arrived in New York as a teenager in the 1970s, was so new to big-city ways that he and his family had never seen an escalator, Nicolaou started working in the movie theaters that then still anchored most Manhattan neighborhoods. He quickly worked his way up, becoming something of a tri-state mini-mogul at a time when all the small owners were getting squeezed out. Today, he still runs three theaters around the city, including the fantastically crummy and fiercely indie Cinema Village where, Nicolaou cheerfully admits to Ferrara, he charges a few thousand bucks a week for some filmmakers to show their work there. It’s a great deal, he insists, providing the movie the legitimacy of a theatrical release and a review in the New York Times. It’s his way of illustrating how commerce and art can survive and thrive beneath the glass billionaire towers of modern Manhattan.
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A thin but heartfelt piece of work, “The Projectionist” is basic in concept. Ferrara tags along after Nicolaou as he putters about New York and his home back in Cypress, talking about his life. Garrulous but soft-spoken, he’s a charming storyteller whose direct but understated style belies the immigrant pluck and grit that marks his story. Managing several theaters in the 1970s, Nicolaou received a front-line education in how to keep a movie house running. His milieu was the adult houses (including legendary venues like the Eros and Venus) and arthouses. Both are nearly extinct species now, but he remembers them fondly as places for people to come together and enjoy either a great movie or other distractions. “We didn’t police every patron,” he grins.
A movie buff right off the bat (“This is magic,” he remembers thinking after first getting a glimpse of Manhattan movie houses) but also a canny businessman, Nicolaou saved up his money, and as real estate cratered out in the harsh economic climate, he moved from managing theaters to owning them. By the time the Cineplex Odeon chain came muscling into town in the 1980s, he could demand a cool million-and-a-half dollars from them for just one relatively dinky location.
Ferrara splices into Nicolaou’s long, weaving spiels with bits from the kinds of various exploitation flicks (softcore to hardcore and kung fu) that the burgeoning impresario would have been showing, along with bits from artier offerings of the period like “The Devils” and “Putney Swope.” Later on, as Nicolaou gives the director a proud tour of his three remaining theaters—besides Cinema Village, he still runs Alpine Cinemas in Bay Ridge and Cinemart in Forest Hills—Ferrara cuts back to the original “Blade Runner” in a somewhat offkey nod to the passing of time (“Blade Runner 2049” is showing in many theaters at the time).
Lobbing questions and casually gabbing with passerby, Ferrara bobs in and out of the shot with the caffeinated and profane bustling chaos that typifies much of his work but doesn’t exactly lead to clear nonfiction storytelling. He and Nicolaou make for a superb New York pairing: the gentlemanly but steel-spined immigrant businessman and the outer-borough loudmouth with a thousand opinions, both dressed in black and keeping an eye peeled for angles.
Despite the easy camaraderie with his subject, Ferrara never forges the kind of connection between Nicolaou and himself or the audience that would have made “The Projectionist” as meaningful as it could have been. The two of them certainly represent a different era for the city. But even though some of Ferrara’s earlier work (“Driller Killer” in particular) would probably have been playing at Nicolaou’s houses during the 1970s, that bond does not make its presence known here. There is a kind of love triangle here, between the two men and the cinema. But with Ferrara content to let his subject mostly drive the show and not impose more of an authorial vision and context that could have created a grander narrative about the history of moviegoing in New York, the passion is missing.
Without it, “The Projectionist” may not have a chance to gain that large of an audience. Hopefully, though, it will at least play at Cinema Village. [B]
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